Melanie Avellaneda > Melanie's Quotes

“So that's us: processed corn, walking.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect

“When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people—when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people—issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Letters

“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“It is white people’s responsibility to be less fragile; people of color don’t need to twist themselves into knots trying to navigate us as painlessly as possible.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The language of innovation is often spoken in a tone that betrays a paradoxical combination of grandiose evangelism and task-oriented practicality, an impersonal celebration of technology, and an earnest celebration of aesthetic idiosyncrasies.”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“How many yous have you been?
How many,
Lined up inside,
Each killing the last?”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“You will come away bruised.
You will come away bruised
but this will give you poetry.”
― Yrsa Daley-Ward

“If you are afraid to write it,
that's a good sign.
I suppose you know when you're
writing the
truth when you're terrified.”
― Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.”
― Patti Smith, M Train: A Memoir

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“The starry sky is the truest friend in life, when you've first become acquainted; it is ever there, it gives ever peace, ever reminds you that your restlessness, your doubt, your pains are passing trivialities.”
― Erling Kagge, Silence in the Age of Noise

“In both my lives, my nerves go bust.
I’m certain that I’m not

as I appear, that I’m a figment
and you’re not really here.

The struggle
is authenticity.

I have a message.
You must believe me.”
― Camille Rankine, Incorrect Merciful Impulses

“Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

“I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies”
― Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War